First off, you'll at least need farming for booze (unless you plan on forcing all your dwarfs to drink mead).
Secondly, whereas turkeys and the like will provide a lot of food and leather, at my current fort (for example) the hunters are bringing in UNICORNS!!1! and they're an awful lot of food and fancy leather.
Now, to poultry. I'll take you through what I do and explain the logic at each point.
I use geese, they mature quicker than turkeys and still lay a good-sized clutch (number of eggs).
I take 3 females (geese) and 3 males (ganders) with me upon embark. I then butcher the 2 least suitable males for extra meat, leather and bones.
Poultry doesn't need pasture, so I like to carve out rooms underground for them and also build nestboxes for them.
I don't really bog myself down in the details of exactly how many rooms I need or how big they should be, but they're usually 2x6 with a one square entrance for a door. I put the egg-layers in one room, the males in another and have other rooms set aside for the young that will be born.
I lock (forbid) the door to the egg-laying room, [v]iew the geese that are most suited to breeding (big and muscular), then I press [t] and look at their nestboxes and then forbid the eggs of the most suitable goose. I then unlock the door so the dwarves can harvest the eggs of the others for food, whilst the forbidden eggs will eventually hatch to be geese.
I then put the young in their own pasture in another room and wait for them to mature (I may do this 2 or 3 times with the same mother goose).
Once they're mature I remove their pasture and then repasture them according to male or female in 2 empty rooms. The reason for removing the pasture is that the new geese and ganders will show up in the list as not being already penned.
I then work out which males should go to breeding, which females should go for egg-laying and then slaughter the rest, including maybe the first generation if I'm feeling merciless. Also, inbreeding be damned.
Only slaughter mature poultry, and remember that a meal can't be made purely from eggs.
If you're being very compact with this design and keeping the number of poultry to a small scale (you'll be overrun with meat and eggs, anyway) you can have 2 rooms for males, 2 for females, 1 for young and then just alternate between rooms as you alternate between generations.
I realise it's quite a long-winded explanation, and I hope it comes across quite clearly even without diagrams, but I used it mainly as a way of introducing my points, like why I prefer geese, for example.